A recipient of a communication may prefer to be contacted in a certain way. For example, a first person may prefer to receive email rather than real-time phone calls while a second person may prefer to receive voice mails rather than real-time voice communications. The choices of a communicating party may depend on where they are, who is attempting to contact them, and so on. Conventionally, to satisfy recipient (and/or sender) preferences, a person may perform actions like automatically forwarding voice mail communications via a unified messaging system to an email server or directing a receptionist to route all phone calls to voice mail rather than to the actual person. Such approaches suffer from drawbacks including set up time, inflexibility, a digital on/off quality, and requiring the user of the system to reason concerning whether the preferences apply to all communications, for example.
For example, an experienced secretary may be able to reason concerning how a certain communication should be routed. Rather than inflexibly applying preferences (e.g., automatically routing all phone calls to voice mail), an experienced secretary may decide not to route a phone call from the hospital emergency room to voice mail but rather to page the intended recipient or to interrupt a meeting in which the recipient is participating. However, such skilled personnel may be in short supply, may be expensive to employ and may take years to train. Furthermore, such skilled personnel may have limited availability (e.g., eight hours a day minus coffee breaks).
Thus, the present state of the art is largely dependant upon human reasoning to override preset preferences for modes of communication.